1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a conveyor system of the type which has two or more endless belts in intersecting relation at a transition area, the first of which receives the articles in one position, and at the transition area the position of each of the articles is changed to another position, prior to being deposited upon and transported on the second endless belt to locations for sorting and storage.
2. Description of the Prior Art
One of the problems associated with the transportation and storage of small containers, such as boxed tape cassettes, is that such cassettes are received in cartons, which cartons may include a variety of titles of tapes, or single titles, all of which must be sorted as to title and then stored. Boxed tape cassettes are typically marked on the exterior of the carton with indicia, such as a bar code, which is electronically read for tape sorting and subsequent storage. One typical available conveyor system moves the tape casettes along in front of a quantity of storage bins with the codes being read, and the tapes moved off the conveyor at the proper bin. This system, however, requires that the casettes be manually placed on a conveyor belt in proper sequence and properly aligned for reading, which operation due to the tremendous quantity of tapes being handled is cost prohibitive. Examples of prior art systems which orient articles such as boxes are shown in the U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,444,919 to Hay; 2,499,694 to Stenger; 3,776,344; to Harrison; and 4,193,491 to James et al. but none of these systems performs the desired operations.
The conveyor system of my invention receives the tapes from boxes onto a first conveyor belt, in stacks, on edge, and moves them to another location where their orientation is changed to a face down flat position for deposition on a second conveyor belt. The second belt then transports the cassettes in front of storage bins, where the bar code can be read and the tapes removed to the various bins according to their coding.